Vol. 5, 28 March 2024
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
In the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” young Marx addressed a novel issue: whereas traditional political economists regarded private property as an object opposed to the subject, adopting a metaphysical mode of thinking characterized by subject-object opposition, Adam Smith, referred to by Engels as the “Luther” of political economy, for the first time connected private property with the subject, thereby breaking away from its previous characterization as an “objective, external” dimension, implying signs of transcending Feuerbach. However, although Adam Smith and other political economists placed private property within human nature, due to their class limitations, they effectively treated profit-seeking activities as human nature, which is essentially a negation of humanity and diverges from human essence on the level of value. Marx, in critiquing their inherited ideas, not only links labor with private property but also understands labor as genuine, a return to “the essence of humanity,” as free labor rather than alienated labor, thereby laying the groundwork for the establishment of a scientific understanding of practice.
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Private Property, Labor, New Worldview
1. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2009). Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Vol. 1, pp. 112-114, 168-185, 206). People’s Publishing House.
2. Lüsenbei. (1978). History of Political Economy (Vol. 1, pp. 38, 43, 142). (X. Li, Trans.). Beijing, China: Life · Reading · New Knowledge Joint Publishing Company.
3. Liu, X. (2013). A Reexamination of Marx’s “Paris Manuscripts” (pp. 23, 130). Beijing, China: Renmin University of China Press.
4. Jin, S. (1983). Changes in Marx’s Critique of Classical Political Economy: What Does It Explain? Philosophical Research, (09), 17-23.
5. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2012). Selected Works of Marx and Engels (Vol. 1, p. 137). People’s Publishing House.
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Authors who publish this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See Open Access Instruction).